[Rd] Adding Tk extensions to R for windows

[Marsland, John]

My understanding is that MSYS was designed to provide a Minimal SYStem to
complement the Minimal GNU tools. So you can run the ./configure on windows
just the same as any unix variant and make as normal. I understand it uses
native libraries rather then the cygwin.dll .. so should be faster??? 

This would completely remove the need for separate windows project (except
for any platform specific devices eg graphics, GUIs etc ... MSYS provides
extensions for the win32 API also) - in exactly the same way and the new Mac
osX/fink build works. 

One of my main reasons for interest is that I was trying to use the
GTK/Glade libraries and it seemed as if quite a lot of modification was
necessary for win32 systems. I got more interested when I started thinking
about Rpvm and all the spare win32 boxes sitting around - curently this
package only works for unix/linux systems. My guess is that an awful lot
more of the R project could be made non-platform-specific if this route is
followed.

Or in their own words .... [http://www.mingw.org/msys.shtml]

"This package provides a minimal POSIX system to allow a typical configure
script to execute so that you can execute make.  It provides a native
mingw32 host/build/target system in order to use the MinGW port of GCC and
binutils to port other packages to the Windows environment.  It eliminates
the complexities of the semi-cross build system provided by -mno-cygwin.  It
removes the need to use programs such as cygpath by auto translating the
path strings appropriately.  With version 1.0.8 both paths in arguments and
paths in the environment are converted."

The MSYS developer took kit provides the following packages:

autoconf
automake
libtool
autogen
openssl
openssh
cvs
guile
inetutils

Regards,

John Marsland

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Duncan Murdoch [mailto:dmurdoch at pair.com]
> Sent: 30 September 2003 12:56
> To: Marsland, John
> Cc: r-devel at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: Re: [Rd] Adding Tk extensions to R for windows
> 
> 
> On Tue, 30 Sep 2003 11:34:27 +0100, you wrote:
> 
> >Have you tried to make R under MSYS/MinGW, there would seem 
> to be some
> >obvious benefits to this over the current collection of 
> Cygwin tools? 
> 
> I haven't tried that; what benefits do you see?
> 
> Duncan Murdoch
> 


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